One of
political mastermind Karl Rove’s favorite writers is none other than Jorge Luis
Borges, the Argentine fabulist. Alec Nevala-Lee on what Borges’s stories reveal
about Rove’s alternate political reality.

Years ago,
or so we’re told, a reclusive southern businessman, contemptuous of the world
around him, decided to invent a country of his own. Using his vast fortune, he
bankrolled a secretive organization of writers and intellectuals whose mission
was to construct nothing less than every last detail of an alternate reality,
similar to our own in many ways, but more orderly and elegant, in which
anything could come true as long as enough people believed in it. The result
was an enormously convincing fictional world, and its reception exceeded its
creator’s most optimistic expectations. Presented with such a beautiful
falsehood, the rest of humanity gratefully embraced the illusion. It began to
study, teach, and debate a totally imaginary history and science, until the
real thing, neglected, was all but forgotten.

karl-rove-borges-lee-tease

This is the
plot of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” one of the most famous stories by the
Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, who belongs on any short list of the
greatest writers of the 20th century. Borges has a lot of admirers, including
me, but if the story above seems uncomfortably familiar, it may be due to the
influence of one of his most avid fans. He’s a man who, in response to a Proust
questionnaire in Vanity Fair, put Borges at the top of an alphabetical catalog
of beloved authors, and playfully named the real Borges as his favorite hero of
fiction. He mentions Borges prominently on his website, with an approving nod
to the story about “the encyclopedia on a nation that doesn’t exist,” and in a
video promoting one of his own books, although he has trouble pronouncing
Borges’s name correctly. He is Karl Rove.

Oddly
enough, aside from a recent humor piece by Nathaniel Stein on The New Yorker
blog, Rove’s love of Borges has gone mostly unremarked, perhaps because it
seems so incongruous. In general, members of the conservative establishment
aren’t known for their taste in literature. Mitt Romney once acknowledged, in
what is probably his second-most embarrassing online video, that his favorite
novel is L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth, and the identity of Paul Ryan’s
novelist of choice is a matter of record. As a result, it’s surprising, and
superficially encouraging, to find a prominent figure on the right who openly
admires a writer numbered among Joyce and Kafka as one of the essential authors
of the modern age.

Yet it
isn’t hard to see why Rove is drawn to his work. The great theme in Borges,
among all those labyrinths and mirrors, is how the world can be shaped, and
even physically transformed, by the intellectual structures we impose on it. In
his story “The Secret Miracle,” a man waiting to be executed pictures all the
possible forms that his death might take, as if by imagining the worst, he can
prevent it from happening—an attitude that many Democrats assumed before the
recent election. “The Lottery in Babylon”
describes a government so powerful that its actions can no longer be
distinguished from the operations of the universe, which seems like a
conservative’s nightmare of Obamacare, but which might also appeal to a man who
once dreamed of a permanent Republican majority. (On his website, Rove refers
to this story as involving “a lottery in Baghdad,”
a Freudian slip of epic proportions.)

These ideas
find their fullest expression in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” In the fictional
world invented by Borges’s army of scholars, the only science is psychology,
and an idea, or even a physical object, can become real if enough people believe
it exists. Rove has put this principle into action more aggressively than any
other political figure in recent memory. It lurks behind the push polls in the
South Carolina primary calculated to plant the rumor that John McCain had
fathered a black child, and in the White House Iraq Group, chaired by Rove,
designed to sell the public on the supposed threat of Saddam Hussein—a more
targeted version of Orbis Tertius, with its secret group of intellectuals
“directed by an obscure man of genius.”

And then
there’s Fox News, for which Rove has long served as a sort of spiritual
godfather. Borges notes that mankind was seduced by the fictional universe of
Tlön because its rules were more elegant than reality itself, which is
precisely what Fox News provides. Its vision of the world is compellingly
clear: it’s easier to believe that the president is a Muslim socialist who
secretly wants to take our guns away than to understand the perplexing truth,
which even many observers on the left have trouble accepting, that he’s a
political moderate who draws much of his policy from the conservative playbook
of the past. And unlike the shadowy cabal of Orbis Tertius, this systematic
reordering and simplification of reality has taken place in plain sight.

Borges
himself was well aware that his story was more than just a fantasy. The
countries that remake themselves after the model of Orbis Tertius are the same
ones that had previously been drawn to communism, fascism, and any other system
with a semblance of order. When the author notes that a world in which physical
artifacts can be willed into existence allows for “the interrogation and even
the modification of the past,” it’s hard not to connect this to the rewriting
of history under authoritarian regimes. “The lies of a dictatorship are neither
believed nor disbelieved,” Borges writes elsewhere. “They pertain to an
intermediate plane, and their purpose is to conceal or justify sordid or
atrocious realities.”

It’s
tempting to think that these lies came crashing down on election night, in
which Rove stuck obstinately to his guns on Fox News even as the reality at
Obama headquarters threatened to break through from the other side of the split
screen. Rove’s refusal to accept his own network’s call for Ohio was the logical culmination of the
inability of such conservative pundits as Dick Morris to acknowledge the
possibility of any outcome short of a Romney landslide. Like the characters in
Borges, they’re idealists in the original, philosophical sense, who hope that
if they believe something strongly enough—and say it as loudly as possible—it
just might come true. In the end, anchorwoman Megyn Kelly wandered off to find
answers in the labyrinth beyond the news desk, leaving Rove, like many a Borges
protagonist before him, unable to free himself from his own illusions.

But his
public meltdown shouldn’t fool us. The nonexistent nation is alive and well. In
Borges’s imaginary universe, places survive as long as people believe in them,
like the doorway that continued to exist only while it was frequented by a
single beggar. Rove has far more true believers, and thanks to a media
landscape as fragmented as any postmodern narrative, in which individuals of
all political parties listen only to sources that confirm their own beliefs, that
alternate reality is still standing. As Borges warns, what remains is a
fictional history, “filled with moving episodes,” harmonized to remove all
inconvenient facts. When the project of Orbis Tertius is complete, he writes,
“The world will be Tlön.” And thanks largely to Rove and his successors, for
much of the country, it already is.